Flex Mentallo

The Milkmaid

Young woman with a water pitcher

And finally, a gallery of other works. No more words - enjoy the silence... Woman holding a balance

The achievement of Vermeer's maturity is complete. It is not open to extension: no universal style is discovered. We have never the sense of abundance that the characteristic jewels of his century gives us, the sense that the precious vein lies open, ready to be worked. There is only one Lacemaker: we cannot imagine another. It is a complete and single definition. Lawrence Gowing, Vermeer, 1952

One of Vermeer's most celebrated works is The Lacemaker Dutch culture of the 17th century was a conflict between home and world. In response to their own commercial successes, they invented the "cult of housework," an ideological elevation of domestic work to an almost sacral status. However, the Dutch often attached moral values (frequently contradictory) to each of these activities so that the painting could not only delight the eye, but nourish the soul as well. Embroidery, like lacemaking, was traditionally shown in representations of the Education of the Virgin. In Dutch literary and pictorial traditions sewing and lacemaking were associated with fundamental values of Dutch culture, industriousness and domestic virtue. Women belonged in the home, doing needlework, taking care of the household, and looking after the children. The Lacemaker, therefore, pictures an ideal: an industrious woman in a tidy house. While engaged in work rather than leisure, her elaborate hairdo and elegant satin dress seem to be more in keeping with middle or upper class. However, there can be little doubt that her diligence will preserve her virtue: within easy reach is a small book on the foreground table, most likely a prayer book or small Bible.

Supper at Emmaus (Van Meegeren)

...except that on this occasion, the second painting is not by Vermeer at all - but by Han Van Meegeren, considered to be one of the most ingenious art forgers of the 20th century. From Wikipedia: As a child, van Meegeren developed an enthusiasm for the paintings of the Dutch Golden Age, and later set out to become an artist himself. When art critics decried his work as tired and derivative, van Meegeren felt that they had destroyed his career. Thereupon, he decided to prove his talent to the critics by forging paintings of some of the world's most famous artists, including Frans Hals, Pieter de Hooch, Gerard ter Borch and Johannes Vermeer. He so well replicated the styles and colours of the artists that the best art critics and experts of the time regarded his paintings as genuine and sometimes exquisite. His most successful forgery was Supper at Emmaus, created in 1937 while living in the south of France. This painting was hailed by some of the world’s foremost art experts as the finest Vermeer they had ever seen. During World War II, wealthy Dutchmen, wanting to prevent a sellout of Dutch art to Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, avidly bought van Meegeren's forgeries. Nevertheless, a falsified "Vermeer" ended up in the possession of Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring. Following the war, the forgery was discovered in Göring's possession, and van Meegeren was arrested on 29 May 1945 as a collaborator, as officials believed that he had sold Dutch cultural property to the Nazis. This would have been an act of treason, the punishment for which was death, so van Meegeren fearfully confessed to the forgery. On 12 November 1947, after a brief but highly publicized trial, he was convicted of falsification and fraud charges, and was sentenced to a modest punishment of one year in prison. He never served his sentence, however; before he could be incarcerated, he suffered a heart attack and died on 30 December 1947. It is estimated that van Meegeren duped buyers, including the government of the Netherlands, out of the equivalent of more than thirty million dollars in today's money.

Woman Reading Music

Clearly, Vermeer used a limited number of "sets" - apparently confining most of his interiors to two rooms in his own house. He frequently used the same model in more than one painting, perhaps servants, perhaps his wife. Woman in blue reading a letter

The Concert In the early hours of 18 March 1990 thieves entered the Dutch Room of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. They tied up the guards, and made off with an estimated $500,000,000 in paintings, including Rembrandt's only known seascape, Storm On The Sea of Galilee and Vermeer's The Concert. They disappeared, along with two other works by Rembrandt, five sketches by Degas, a Manet painting, a landscape by Flink and a bronze finial from a Napoleonic battle flag. 20 years on, the Gardner robbery remains the largest single property theft of all time. The whereabouts of the paintings remains unknown, though it is speculated that the theft was either planned or the loot subsequently usurped by Mob boss James "Whitey" Bulger. There is a $5,000,000 reward offered for their safe return, as yet unclaimed. The Concert remains the world's most valuable single stolen artwork - estimates value it at around £200m

The Art of Painting Another reason for suggesting that Vermeer used the camera obscura has to do with the maps that he shows hanging on the wall in a number of paintings. The instrument was apparently used very widely in the 18th and 19th centuries - before photography - for copying prints and pictures, and for enlarging or reducing them.

Girl with a red hat Scholars have pointed to effects in Vermeer's canvases that seem to carry more distinctive marks of an optical way of working. For example, it is significant that there are several passages where Vermeer seems to paint in very soft focus, as in his little portrait of the Girl with a Red Hat.

Officer and Laughing Girl The only source of information is the paintings themselves. The first person to make the suggestion, as long ago as 1891, was the American graphic artist Joseph Pennell, who pointed to what he called the 'photographic perspective' of Vermeer's Officer and Laughing Girl. The two figures sit very close across the corner of the table. But the image of the officer's head is about twice as wide as that of the smiling girl. The perspective is perfectly correct in a geometrical sense: the discrepancy arises because the viewpoint of the picture is close to the soldier. We are quite familiar today with foreground objects appearing very large in snapshots. But in 17th-century painting this is rather unusual, and Vermeer's contemporaries would have made human figures in a composition of this kind much more nearly equal in size.

When I attended the Royal College of Art, I ws assigned the studio cubicle previously used by the pop artist David Hockney. In a television documentary, Hockney, postulated that Vermeer used a camera obscura to achieve precise positioning in his compositions, asserting that this view is supported by certain light and perspective effects. The often-discussed sparkling pearly highlights in Vermeer's paintings have also been linked by advocates to the possible use of a camera obscura, the primitive lens of which would produce halation. The camera obscura was the predecessor of the photographic camera, but without the light-sensitive film or plate. It is well established that in the 18th century some other famous painters employed the device, the best-known being Canaletto, whose own camera obscura survives in the Correr Museum in Venice. The English portrait painter Sir Joshua Reynolds owned a camera; and the device was widely used by landscape artists, both professional and amateur, up until the invention of chemical photography in the 1830s. With Vermeer the question of whether he used optical methods is more controversial. The term 'camera obscura' means 'dark chamber', because the instrument up until the 16th century typically took the form of a closed room, the windows shuttered, with a small hole in a blind or door. Light entering the room through the hole then cast an image onto a screen or onto the wall opposite the door. It has sometimes been suggested that Vermeer might have used a camera of a rather different kind, which certainly existed in his time, but which was only manufactured in large numbers in the 18th and 19th centuries, and which took the form of a closed box, with an external translucent screen. The observer is now outside the box, not inside it. Both Canaletto's and Reynolds's cameras were of this type.

To my eye, Johansson's resemblance to the model is even more striking in Girl with a red hat, which appears later on in another context, and Girl with a flute Girl with a flute

As of course everyone knows, in 1999 Tracy Chevalier wrote a historical novel in which Vermeer becomes close with a fictional servant named Griet whom he hires as a model, and paints while wearing one of his wife's pearl earrings. The 2003 film stars Scarlett Johansson as Griet. (There was also a play in 2008.)

The Girl with the Pearl Earring is often referred to as "the Dutch Mona Lisa".

Vrel is an interesting painter in hiis own right, but by contrast, here is Vermeer's The Glass of Wine "There is no other seventeenth century artist that from very early on in his career employed, in the most lavish way, the exorbitantly expensive pigment lapis lazuli, natural ultramarine. Not only do we see it used in elements that are intended to be shown as blue, like a woman’s’ skirt, a sky, the headband on the Girl with the Pearl Earring.... This working method most probably was inspired by Vermeer’s understanding of Leonardo’s observations that the surface of every object partakes of the colour of the adjacent object. This means that no object is ever seen entirely in its natural colour." Jørgen Wadum

Unlike any other Dutch genre painter, Vermeer used very brilliant colours to create the illusion of light and space. For example, here are two paintings by a contemporary, Yjacobus Vrel:

A Lady Seated at the Virginal was purchased for a mere 2,000 francs in 1867. Though affecting a natural state, the picture is in fact precisely staged, so that everything conspires to bring our eye to the girl's face and the light lovingly falling upon it. But at whom is she looking? The conventions of such genre paintings always imply more than they appear, and the inference is that the viewer is encouraged to think that perhaps her eyes meet those of the viola player, who is perhaps even a lover. Although at first sight, the lucidity of the treatment gives the impression of an almost superhuman capacity to render surfaces in clear focus and consummate detail, in fact Vermeer carefully orchestrates the variable sharpness of focus to create the illusion of space, bringing out certain details, blurring others, and this guides the eye of the viewer to where Vermeer directs it. He literally "tells" us what to notice. Hence the viola and the tapestry at top left together create the impression of a stage in which there is considerable depth of field, into which the eye "walks". The vividly lit viola is sharply in focus, and the colours are in direct contrast with the girl's dress. The warm colours are echoed by the frame of the picture on the wall, just as the colour of the girl's dress is echoed by the drape hanging above and behind her. The further into the picture one penetrates, the less detail one sees. No, it is not the details of surfaces that are clearly defined, so much as the space itself. What we see is a fleeting impression, yet which appears eternal. So what we are looking at is a picture based on an illusion of permanence. O smile, where are you going? O upturned glance: new warm receding wave on the sea of the heart . . . alas, but that is what we are. Does the infinite space we dissolve into, taste of us then? Duino Elegies - The Second Elegy Rainer Maria Rilke The sale of his collection by Thoré-Bürger in 1892 brought the Vermeer's and other works into more public collections.

Woman with a Pearl Necklace (1664, Berlin, Gemäldegalerie) was bought from Henry Grevedon in June 1866.

Details:

Johannes Vermeer 1632–1675: A Detective Story I was delighted to see that Cat chose to show us one of Vermeer's paintings and that he was an influence on his own work. I have an abiding fascination for Vermeer's work myself. It is, so to speak, "a mystery wrapped up in an enigma". Hence there are elements of a detective story in the tale of his life and what happened to his work after his death. Even though he is universally acclaimed as one of the greatest painters who ever lived, a great deal of mystery surrounds the life of Vermeer. He was not widely known in his lifetime outside of his home town of Delft. His wife gave birth to 15 children, four of whom were buried before being baptized. He only painted an estimated 50 paintings of which only 36 are known today - though in the past many more were attributed to him. He died suddenly, as described "in a frenzy". He was in a lot of debt and consequently under a great deal of stress, which probably caused his demise. He left his family quite destitute. He then fell into relative obscurity for almost 200 years; though Albert Blankert asserts that while he did not achieve widespread fame until the nineteenth century, "his work had always been valued and admired by well-informed connoisseurs." The "rediscovery" of Vermeer is predominantly attributed to scholar, collector, French Salon critic and co-founder of L'Alliance des arts, Etienne Joseph Théophile Thoré (1807-1869), alias Thoré-Bürger. As early as 1860, Thoré began purchasing Vermeer paintings. A Lady Standing at the Virginal was acquired sometime before 1876

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light not our darkness that most frightens us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. —Marianne Williamson